A life-changing education

An honor student from an affluent Northampton family, Erin Fetherman could have gotten into virtually any college.

She didn't even try.

Instead, to her parents' dismay, Fetherman joined the Marines in the summer of 1999, between her junior and senior year at Catasauqua Area High School.

On a recruiter's promise that she'd be trained as a linguist, the 17-year-old signed a five-year contract with the Marine Corps.

It was, to say the least, a gutsy move for a thin young woman who looked like anything but your typical Marine. Plus, she'd only be guaranteed training in linguistics if she completed Marine boot camp, a rigorous program that concludes with a three-day survival test in the wilds of South Carolina.

Be it fate, providence or just plain coincidence, Erin's gamble paid off in ways she could not have imagined. Her five years as a Marine were a life-changing experience that took her to the front lines of history.

She was a Marine during the two seminal events that mark the beginning of the 21st century -- the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Trained as an Arabic translator, her tours of duty took her to combat zones in Kuwait and Iraq.

While many of her classmates from Catasauqua's Class of 2000 were earning college degrees, Marine Cpl. Fetherman was translating top-secret documents and ducking Saddam Hussein's missiles and Iraqi insurgent mortar attacks.

Honorably discharged three weeks ago, 23-year-old Fetherman says her journey from the insulated life of a small town in the Lehigh Valley to desert battle zones on the other side of the world has given her a deeper understanding of life.

"You get a sense of your own mortality," she said, "when you realize you can go at any minute."

Missed graduation

When Erin Fetherman reported for duty at Parris Island, S.C., on May 30, 2000, her classmates at Catasauqua High were preparing for graduation.

Fetherman graduated two weeks early to keep her date, so to speak, with a Marine drill sergeant, camouflage fatigues and an M-16.

Gerber had envisioned her daughter, who'd always been a good student, going to college. It hurt, too, that after going through school with the same group of friends, Erin was not there to receive her diploma.

Gerber knew, though, that her daughter was no quitter. Ever since she was a child, she'd come home from school and done her homework without being told.

"Erin's always been very self-disciplined," said Gerber, a St. Luke's Hospital X-ray technician. "She always finished what she started."

Ervin C. Fetherman, too, worried at the thought of his daughter wearing a Marine uniform, even though the country was not at war at the time.

"You wait 18 years to see your child graduate from high school," said Fetherman. "It hurt not to see her graduate."

Erin made it through boot camp, surviving the dreaded Crucible -- three days on little food in conditions that mimic combat -- and earning the right to wear the Marines' "Globe and Anchor" emblem. And, as promised, she was assigned to one-and-a-half years of intensive training in Arabic.

In June 2002, her parents finally got to see her graduate -- from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif.

History intervenes

On Sept. 11, 2001, when Muslim terrorists rammed airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Somerset County, Fetherman was already spending eight hours a day learning Arabic.

When America, Britain and a coalition of allies attacked Iraq on March 19, 2003, she was already at Camp Doha, Kuwait, translating documents from Arabic to English.

"Now I know," she thought, listening to a BBC bulletin that the war with Iraq had begun, "that I am here for good reason."

Working in tiny cubicles with two other women -- 12 hours a day, seven days a week -- Marine translator Fetherman could feel the concussion of Iraqi missiles lobbed into Kuwait.

"There was constant missile bombardment," she recalls.

Her deployment to Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq war lasted seven months, then Fetherman returned to stateside duty. In August 2004, she was assigned to duty in the Al Anbar Province, Iraq.

In a compound crafted from the ruins of one of Saddam's palaces in Ramadi, near the Euphrates River in central-west Iraq, Fetherman lived in crowded quarters with 11 other female translators with the 2nd Radio Battalion.

Because of the sensitive nature of her top-secret work, Fetherman will not talk about what she translated. Her job was "to find the bad guys and tell someone to go get them."

At the Defense Language Institute, Fetherman said, she was taught modern standard Arabic. In Iraq, though, she had to learn the Iraqi dialect. The languages are similar, but not identical. She compares it to Spanish and Portuguese, which are similar but not the same.